Actuatable occupant restraining systems having an inflatable air bag in vehicles are known in the art. Such systems that are controlled in response to whether the seat is occupied, an object on the seat is animate or inanimate, a rearward facing child seat present on the seat, and/or in response to the occupant's position, weight, size, etc., are referred to as smart restraining systems. One example of a smart actuatable restraining system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,330,226.
Pattern recognition systems include systems capable of distinguishing among classes of real world stimuli according to a plurality of distinguishing characteristics, or features, associated with the classes. A number of pattern recognition systems are known in the art, including various neural network classifiers, support vector machines, and Bayesian classification models. Training and configuring classifiers is often a time consuming and difficult process. Even once a plurality of features have been found that distinguish among a plurality of classes of interest for a classifier, it is necessary to determine a hypothesis function that separates the classes in a feature space defined by the features. This determination can be complicated when one or more of the plurality of classes cannot be concisely represented within the feature space.